linking up at Jennifer Rizzo’s link party 2015
http://www.jenniferrizzo.com/2015/12/holiday-house-walk-2015-link-party-be-on-next-years-tour.htm
Hello and Welcome to my Holiday Home Tour! I am so glad that you are here!
This time of year is always so crazy ?I actually intended to forgo a home tour this year in light of everything else that was going on. Given this blog is just barely 2 weeks old I figure all would be forgiven… Well I had a change of heart last week and decided to heck with it and in about 24 hours decked our halls and spiffed up our home for a holiday home tour! I am so glad that I did and I am even more thrilled to be sharing it with you all!
It started with a cow… Yes you read that right! My favorite week in blog land happened last week Jennifer Rizzos holiday house walk. You guys I wait for this every year and am always so inspired by the incredible homes and with out fail it gets my wheels spinning! So naturally I started thinking what would I do “IF” I decided to do a holiday home tour. I had already created this holiday cow for free gift tag printables and thought it would be even better blown up into a monster sized sign for my mantle! Before I knew it I was standing in the middle of a Christmas tree lot smelling evergreens and had all kinds of glittery Christmas sprays and burlap ribbon filling the back of my car!
I came home and started with the tree. I knew I wanted to up my Christmas tree game this year and it was time to update our newlywed Christmas ornaments from 6 years ago. I really wanted to be budget conscious because there is no sense in blowing a couple hundred dollars on ornaments when I could easily with some extra effort and time make my own ornaments. Being that I am a sign maker I naturally have a stash of wood scraps on hand at all times! So new ornaments were first on the list for this holiday home tour!
I dug through my pile of scrap wood until I found the perfect piece to chop up into some rustic ornaments! Thankfully it was already stained so the only thing left was to figure out what to paint on it! I eventually settled on a very simplistic design of simple holiday phrases such as “Noel, Merry, Peace, & Joy”?I used my beloved Silhouette cutting machine to cut out some vinyl for the lettering stencil and painted them with a cream latex paint. Using my drill I put holes through the top and strung them with some rustic twin string!
I then took the second free Christmas gift tag printable that I had already cooked up to share with you guys changed the colors to cream and turned it into an ornament as well! I printed these out on plain computer paper and used brown craft paper as an extra edge around the Christmas tree and truck print! SO easy and simple!! and really added to the look I was going for our holiday home tour.
The only new purchases I made for the tree were the frosty crystal pick branches, the red holly picks and the burlap ribbon which were all 50-60% off at Michael’s! Not bad for a girl on a mission trying to keep things under budget! Which is something I am sure you can all relate to as well!
Next up was the tree skirt… or should I say lack of one!! In all my years of decorating for Christmas I have never been on the tree skirt bandwagon! Why? when you can just fill the bottom of your tree with presents! Seeing as all my decorating happened after Black Friday I jumped on the wrapping train early and got most of our presents under the tree and didn’t have to fuss over a tree skirt WIN WIN!
The mantle was a huge element to my design this year for our holiday home tour. I knew I wanted to go simple but bold! What better than a cow head adorned in a holly wreath?! This sign actually happened at 1 am after many rounds of cherry coke and possibly a tear or two… I had not intended to end up with such patina on the background but it ended up being quite the happy accident and after determining it wasn’t totally a mess up but the result of a new un-found technique and beautiful texture I am so happy with it! I will be sharing a step by step tutorial so that you can achieve this look too very soon! Because who doesn’t need a little more patina in their life? Especially in a holiday home tour?! This girl right here certainly does!
Adorning the sides of my pretty little cow are two Rosemary plants that I snagged at Home Depot! I transplanted them into these pretty but simple pots from Ace Hardware and that was it! They smell AMAZING and the combination of the fresh tree and Rosemary in our home is to die for! The smells of Christmas really do it for me and get me out of Grinch mode into happy decorating baking mode pretty instantly!
The stockings are from my favorite quilter of all time! Rachel who I run my Etsy Shop with! She made these for me last year! She was the only one who had any idea we were planning for baby number 4 when she made them. It’s so exciting to have miss Portlynn here this year who is just fresh and new straight from heaven at only 16 weeks old! Getting her here was quite the journey for both her and I and a story for another day. But Lets just say hanging that extra stocking up this year was so special and really made my heart burst of thankful new mommy feelings! We had just begun thinking about adding baby number four this time last year so having her here now is so surreal. It never ceases to amaze me how much really does change in just a year. We are certainly counting our blessings and feeling so grateful for what 2015 has brought to our family.
Lastly I strung my old set of stockings that no longer fits our family of 6 on my beloved farm house hutch! I didn’t have enough time to really deck out the whole family room for our holiday home tour but I wanted to at least do a little something! So I grabbed some trimming from our real tree and hung up the stockings for good measure!
That completes our holiday home tour for 2015 and I cannot wait to share all the added details free printables and tutorials that are a result from this years tour! So please stay tuned! If you enjoyed this post please feel free to leave a comment or pin away on Pinterest! we are always so grateful to our readers who share the love and give us positive feed back!
Disclaimer-this post contains affiliate links however all products and recommendations I have shared above are purely my own!
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XO-Haley
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